France Deploys Dixmude Amphibious Assault Ship to Indo-Pacific for Power Projection Mission.

France’s Jeanne d’Arc 2026 task group has departed Toulon for a five-month deployment spanning the Red Sea, Indian Ocean, and Indo-Pacific, centered on the Mistral-class amphibious ship Dixmude and the upgraded frigate Aconit. The mission blends officer training with live power projection drills across contested sea lanes, reinforcing France’s role as a resident Indo-Pacific security actor alongside U.S. and allied forces.

The French Ministry of the Armed Forces and the Marine nationale confirmed on February 19, 2026, that the Jeanne d’Arc 2026 task group has sailed from Toulon for a five-month deployment stretching from the Mediterranean into the Red Sea, East Africa, the Indian Ocean, and onward to the Indo-Pacific. Built around the Mistral-class amphibious assault ship Dixmude (L9015) and escorted by the La Fayette-class stealth frigate Aconit (F713), the mission blends the traditional formation of naval officers with a more pointed operational signal: France is rehearsing joint power projection under the same maritime security pressures that now define key sea lanes across three continents.
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Dixmude is a Mistral-class amphibious assault ship, combining a six-spot flight deck and hangar for a mixed helicopter and drone air wing with a well deck for EDA landing craft, while also serving as a floating command post and hospital for expeditionary operations (Picture source: Marine Nationale).

Jeanne d’Arc has always been a training cruise, but 2026 is shaped by geography and message discipline. French regional media reporting from Toulon emphasized that, after recent Atlantic-focused editions, this year’s course turns decisively east toward the Philippines, with stops that also thread through France’s own Indian Ocean equities such as Mayotte, the Îles Éparses, and Réunion. In plain terms, the Navy is using a cadet deployment to rehearse contested transits, reassure partners, and underline that France intends to keep maneuvering room in the Indo-Pacific even as great power competition hardens sea lanes into political terrain.

Dixmude is the kind of ship that turns a diplomatic itinerary into a tactical option set. Built as a Projection and Command ship by Chantiers de l’Atlantique and Naval Group, the 199 m platform displaces about 21,500 t fully loaded and is designed to function simultaneously as an amphibious ship, helicopter carrier, command post, and hospital ship. Its onboard medical complex covers 750 m² with two operating rooms and radiology, providing 69 beds, and the ship can expand capacity by installing a modular field hospital in the hangar to add roughly 50 more beds. This combination matters because it converts presence into endurance: the ship can host a joint headquarters, sustain embarked forces, and absorb casualties or civilian evacuees without depending on local infrastructure.

The class is built around a 6,400 m² flight deck with six landing spots and a hangar sized for up to 16 helicopters, linked by aircraft elevators, while the well deck supports multiple landing craft configurations for ship-to-shore movement. For Jeanne d’Arc 2026, the embarked mix is explicitly joint: a Navy Dauphin for surveillance, logistics, and search-and-rescue, alongside Flotilla 36F’s S-100 Camcopter unmanned aerial system, while the embarked French Army package includes two NH90 Caïman transport-assault helicopters and two Gazelle reconnaissance-attack helicopters. The practical effect is a layered vertical mobility stack, from manned lift and armed escort to persistent unmanned eyes over chokepoints, approaches, and littorals.

Just as important, 2026 puts unusual weight on uncrewed systems beyond the headline Camcopter. Dixmude carries a sizeable detachment of drones, with a stated aim of multiplying surveillance, logistics, and defensive awareness, while imagery coverage points to a broader experimentation set, including systems such as Airbus Flexrotor, a small Sirehna unmanned surface vessel, and a Deep Trekker remotely operated vehicle, plus a newly spotted electro-optical and infrared sensor fit. For an amphibious group, that matters tactically: drones widen the ship’s sensor horizon and can de-risk approaches to ports, anchorages, and landing areas, where small-boat threats, mines, or ambiguous contacts often decide whether a commander keeps initiative or slows to caution.

The La Fayette class was built around signature management and long-range endurance, and the frigate’s basic platform characteristics remain suited to escort work: about 125 m in length, around 3,600 t full load, a 25-knot top speed, and organic helicopter support for over-the-horizon detection and boarding operations. What has changed, and what makes Aconit a far more relevant screen in 2026 than in earlier Jeanne d’Arc eras, is modernization. Aconit completed a refit that replaced legacy combat system elements with the SENIT family, renewed optronic surveillance, swapped out Crotale with Sadral launchers firing the latest-generation Mistral very short-range missiles, and, critically, added a hull sonar that gives the upgraded ships a real anti-submarine warfare role. The same modernization line added Link 22 connectivity and integrated Exocet MM40 Block 3C anti-ship missiles, tightening the escort’s ability to share tracks and contribute a credible sea-denial punch if required.

Put together, Dixmude plus Aconit is a compact amphibious ready group with outsized operational bandwidth. It can put a combined arms detachment ashore, support it from the sea with helicopters and unmanned ISR, and then re-embark at speed, which is precisely the profile needed for crisis response in archipelagic geography. The embarked force stands at roughly 837 personnel, including 162 cadet officers and an embarked tactical group of 160 soldiers, with an infantry-heavy element drawn largely from the 3rd Marine Infantry Regiment and its vehicles, plus the airmobile detachment. The group’s ship-to-shore plumbing is similarly modern: an amphibious flotilla detachment brings an EDA-R fast landing craft and an EDA-S standard craft, giving commanders options between speed and payload depending on sea state, beach gradient, and threat picture.

The itinerary itself reads like a checklist of contemporary maritime friction points and partnership priorities. After transiting the Suez Canal, the group makes an early stop at Port Safaga, with bilateral activity in the Red Sea, before port visits to Mombasa and Dar es Salaam and sovereignty-oriented activity around Mayotte, followed by Réunion and the regional exercise Papangue 26. The deployment then pushes east through Indonesia with split port calls, reaches the Philippines for Balikatan 2026 and Manila, and later folds into Singapore and the French-led La Perouse 2026 exercise, before continuing via Colombo and Kochi, then Abu Dhabi and Djibouti, and returning to the Mediterranean with a final Istanbul call ahead of a mid-July return to Toulon.

With Jeanne d’Arc 2026, France is training future naval leaders, but it is also validating an expeditionary template that remains politically usable: a sovereign, self-contained task group that can appear, cooperate, enforce, evacuate, or deter without dragging a carrier strike group behind it. In an Indo-Pacific defined by distance and ambiguity, the Dixmude-Aconit team offers Paris a tool that is neither symbolic nor escalatory by default, yet is credible enough to matter when presence stops being a slogan and becomes a contest over who can actually operate, with partners, in the same waters.

Written by Evan Lerouvillois, Defense Analyst.

Evan studied International Relations, and quickly specialized in defense and security. He is particularly interested in the influence of the defense sector on global geopolitics, and analyzes how technological innovations in defense, arms export contracts, and military strategies influence the international geopolitical scene.